OIDIUM ALBICANS. 205 



a great want of appetite and impaired digestion. It is lastly not 

 to be overlooked that, although spores are present, they cannot 

 thrive in an uncongenial medium, and that much depends upon 

 the medium, and even the disease itself, as to whether it be able 

 to create a favorable medium for itself or not. It is, however, 

 possible, according to Berg's experiments (much as they require 

 to be repeated), that the fungus itself is able to help to transform 

 (if only to a slight degree) the soil upon which it grows into one 

 more favorable for its growth. It is well known that the age of 

 childhood is the period of diarrhoea, and since the latter occurs 

 more frequently in summer, the summer diarrhoeas of children 

 are greatly in favour of this disease. Age, by itself, does not 

 protect from it, neither does the climate. The growth of the 

 fungus is, moreover, assisted when the spores of fungi fly about 

 in large numbers in a place which is with difficulty ventilated, 

 thus causing always fresh infection. Suckling does not afford 

 unconditional protection, although, on the whole, fewer children 

 nursed by their mothers or by nurses are subject to it than other- 

 wise a fact attributable more to external causes (such as the con- 

 tagiousness of the disease), and to disturbances of the digestion, 

 caused by the unnatural way in which they are reared, than to 

 the quality of the food itself. Temper and sex of the child are 

 of no influence at all. The principal circumstances, favorable 

 or unfavorable, are supplied by the healthy or unhealthy state of 

 the child. We know also that grown-up healthy people, as well 

 as children, are liable to thrush. 



It follows thus that the aphtha or thrush is owing to a fungus, and 

 that it consequently is an entophite, and not an exanthem, and that 

 this eruption is not of a critical nature. The latter may especially be 

 said of the thrush around the anus of children, or of the thrush- 

 crisis, as it is called. These phenomena are by no means real fungi, 

 for nothing is seen of the fungus, but they are simply produced 

 by the mechanical action of the acrid faeces of children. In the 

 case of real thrush, the Oidium albicans becomes perceptible from 

 the very beginning of the disease, and in the smallest spots and 

 points (Berg, Reubold). Should it, however, happen that it 

 cannot be discovered at once, as happened to Remak, it is 

 merely necessary to treat the object with kali causticum. The 

 fungus is accordingly no mere consequence or accident of 

 a disease of the mucous membrane, but the cause of the disease 

 itself. 



